Afterwar — Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers

Nancy Sherman is University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown, trained in ancient ethics (her dissertation work was on Aristotle) and in psychoanalysis (she completed analytic training at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute). She served as the inaugural Distinguished Chair in Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy from 1997 to 1999 — the first philosopher in that role — and that immersion is the formative experience for her long-running work on the moral lives of soldiers. Afterwar is the third in a sequence: Stoic Warriors (2005) established the Stoic frame, The Untold War (2010) brought in the extensive interviews with service members, and Afterwar is the explicit moral-injury book.

Oxford University Press published the book in 2015. OUP's editorial filter is academic-trade and the review reception was substantive — Dissent gave it a long, serious review by Caleb Crain; the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews and Journal of Military Ethics both engaged it on the merits. The book is structured around extensive first-person interviews with U.S. service members (active duty, veterans, family members) that Sherman conducted over more than a decade, and the philosophical analysis is built up out of the interviews rather than illustrated by them. This is the book's methodological strength and is part of why it sits more easily in both philosophy and in veterans' studies than most philosophical work on the construct.

The argument's most distinctive move is the recovery of an explicitly Stoic and Aristotelian vocabulary for the moral emotions. Sherman argues that guilt, shame, resentment, and philia — friendship in the technical Aristotelian sense — read contemporary combat experience more precisely than either the DSM's vocabulary of disorders or contemporary Anglo-American moral theory's vocabulary of obligation and rights. The clinical literature treats these emotions as symptoms to be reduced; Sherman treats them as the moral faculty itself responding to the moral facts of the situation, and argues that suppressing or medicalising them is a category mistake of the sort Shay had warned against twenty years earlier.

The stake is philosophical and pedagogical. Sherman is teaching philosophy to a literate civilian audience through the moral lives of service members; the implicit political claim is that civilian society's distance from its volunteer military is itself a moral problem and that the work of philosophical engagement and listening is owed by civilians to veterans, not only by therapists to patients. The Naval Academy chair on her c.v. is doing real work — it gives the book standing inside the institutions it is talking about — but the argument is finally philosophical rather than institutional.

For the moral-injury corpus Afterwar is the third foundational text after Achilles in Vietnam and the Litz 2009 paper. It occupies the philosophical-companionship corner of the field and reads productively against Soul Repair's theological register and against Tick's mythopoetic-pastoral one. The three together are the standard non-clinical literature on the construct.